Will Calhoun, drummer for the Grammy Award-winning band Living Colour, is a rock star who loves hip-hop and jazz. He encouraged SWC commercial music students to learn the art and science of sound recording.
Young Will Calhoun pushed a milk crate up against the wall below his neighbor’s window in a Bronx brownstone, ambled up and stood on his tippy toes to peer inside.
Steve Jordan was in there playing his drums and Will was soaking in the rock legend’s rhythms. Jordan, who played with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, The Blues Brothers and the Saturday Night Live Band, was unknowingly teaching a future Grammy winner and rock pioneer.
By the time Calhoun turned 27 his band Living Colour had opened for The Rolling Stones, performed on Saturday Night Live and won two Grammys for Best Hard Rock Performance. Calhoun himself had been named the Best Drummer of 1990 by a Rolling Stone magazine reader’s poll.
Living Colour – one of the world’s first all-black power rock bands – shattered categories with music that paid homage to funk, metal and hip-hop in the 1980s and ‘90s. Calhoun has since recorded or toured with music giants such as B.B. King, Mick Jagger, Lauryn Hill and Paul Simon.
Calhoun was invited to SWC by Professor of Commercial Music James “Jay” Henry, a three-time Grammy nominated recording engineer and producer, as part of a guest lecture series for SWC recording arts students. Tucked away on the east side of campus, SWC’s state-of-the-art $6 million recording studio has a multi-year program waiting list. SWC recording arts intern Mary Ann Enginco said there is no place like it in the county.
“If Beyoncé came here tomorrow, we would be ready,” she said. “We are the only studio in San Diego (County) that can say that.”
Calhoun said his recording arts and engineering education at Boston’s Berklee College of Music gave him an advantage.
“(Led Zeppelin guitarist) Jimmy Page was a sound designer at a radio station for the BBC, people don’t know that,” Calhoun said. “Jimmy already had experience on how to make sound shift in a room before he was playing his guitar (for Zeppelin). All those records sound amazing because Jimmy was already educated about sound and how it works.”
Calhoun said his life was immersed in music. Growing up, his neighbors included drum and keyboard legend Jordan, pianist Ray Chew and jazz great Lou Donaldson.
Becoming a professional musician was not a goal when he was a boy. His brother, a drum prodigy, left Will intimidated. That changed on Feb. 19, 1978 when Calhoun shuffled into the Bottom Line, a New York City music venue, to see a concert.
Drummer Billy Cobham headlined the event. Journey bassist Randy Jackson provided the thunder down under. Calhoun said on this night everything changed. It was “divine intervention.”
“When I went backstage to meet (Cobham), (jazz trumpet legend) Miles (Davis) showed up,” he said. “And no one had seen Miles – this was when Miles was cleaning up, so no one had (seen) him for five or six years – and he was always one of my all-time favorite musicians. So when you are (that young) and Miles walks past you and says ‘Hey man, how you doing?’ you can’t speak. After that night I decided to quit all my sports teams and my social life changed. I got a job and I started working and saving money to buy a drum set.”
Calhoun was accepted into New York University, where instructor and bassist Malik Abdul convinced him to go to Berklee where he studied drumming, music production and engineering and film scoring. He took the Bronx with him in his heart.
“1980 was around the time the industry started to change,” he said. “Where rappers I knew at that time – musicians – were selling beats – music – to record labels. So being in the Bronx, watching this thing start in my neighborhood become an industry, and then me studying with people like Horace Arnold and being able to go to the Vanguard and see Elvin Jones and Max Roach and Charlie Persip and all of these great drummers. I felt like that was my school.”
His choice to go to college divided the music community, Calhoun said, and old-school jazz artists like Donaldson and Ralph McDonold told him college would only make him generic.
“Those communities do not want you to become a carved-out piece of musician,” he said. “A lot of that generation’s musicians thought universities made you another cookie in the roll of cookies.”
Henry agreed.
College should breed creativity, he said, and it frustrates him when colleges – including SWC – only teach music like it was math.
“I’ve been here for 15 years and I hear the teachers giving the students the same breathing exercises, the same warm ups,” he said. “For 15 years, performing the same songs. College should teach students to be creative, not to be generic. If you have a teacher that encourages you to challenge everything – including what they are telling you – and to ask questions, to observed, understand and extract information, then you are developing the skills that you are here to (learn).”
While at Berklee, Calhoun only thought about getting back to New York, he said.
“I would turn on (The Tonight Show with) Johnny Carson and I would see my friends playing with Duran-Duran, playing with Sting and there I was in school, starving,” he said. “So there was this energy of ‘I need to get back to New York.’”
Berklee had its faults, Calhoun said, and his thirst for knowledge sometimes put him at odds with faculty and other students.
“Berklee was difficult,” he said. “I was not expecting it to be. Divisive, in a way, how the teachers were teaching their students. But it was a real experience and I was a little bitter about some those experiences.”
Calhoun said his closest allies were the rap artists he grew up with. Unlike the jazz generation, the New York rappers he knew supported his decision to go to Berklee. Though he was missing out on the New York scene, Calhoun said he knew it was not his time.
“I was a little bit intimidated about missing out when the rap scene was more like KRS-One, RUN-D.M.C., Public Enemy, when it was still to me intelligent rap, really good tracks. (This was) stuff (that) was happening around me. I went to high school with some of those guys, so it was tough to leave that scene. But they always gave me their blessing. They were like ‘Will, go to Boston man. We need you. We need all kinds of soldiers out here,’ and that was the beginning.”
Shortly after graduation he found himself with Living Colour and his career skyrocketed.
Calhoun said he did not expect to hit the big time immediately after college. His plans were to be a jazz or session drummer, not join a huge rock band. He was still enthralled by rap.
Rap was birthed out of necessity, Calhoun said, thanks to Reagan-era cuts to music and arts education. These cuts created students who yearned to learn music, but could not afford it.
“What’s brilliant about that art form is one was created out of nothing,” he said.
“(Rap and hip-hop) were created out of necessity for people to be creative, like graffiti. People do not look to that with respect. To me, it has been overlooked because the popular rap became more the negative rap, and that’s not really how rap started. But the guys I played basketball with were there because their parents did not put them in the after-school piano program or Saturday piano lessons. So they created music another way. And there’s the art form.”
